Last April, Facebook’s Vice President of Communications and Public Policy, Eliot Schrage, and Director of Research, David Ginsberg, announced a new initiative to grant scholars access to Facebook data and internal processes in order to facilitate scholarly research on the impact of social media on elections. The initiative, the announcement explained, was to be led by a Commission operating independently made up of respected scholars who would make decisions on research priorities and solicit independent research through requests for proposals.

When the revelations emerged of Facebook’s failure to conduct due diligence to prevent its platform from being used to interfere in elections first surfaced, the business and human rights scholarly and practitioner community began deliberating collectively on this new human rights risk and the company’s deviation from established norms of business and human rights.¹ Taking notice of the announcement of Facebook’s Scholars Initiative, in May members of the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum -- a platform for collaboration among over 300 individuals teaching business and human rights in over 40 countries and 200 institutions worldwide – decided to write a letter to Schrage, Ginsberg and the two academic leads of the initiative – Prof Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School and Prof Gary King of Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Our purpose was to make the case for why a business and human rights perspective is essential and therefore to ask that at least one business and human rights expert be included on the Commission. The letter was drafted jointly with the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association, whose members total over 160 scholars from six continents, and signed by over 50 members from both organizations. The petition was also signed by Prof. John Ruggie, Harvard Professor, former UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, and the architect of the of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Facebook’s Schrage responded within a week, copying Professors King and Persily and encouraging them to continue the conversation with us. The following week, Joanne Bauer, co-director of the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum, and Michael Santoro, President of the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association had what they thought was a productive phone conversation with Gary King in which they provided an overview of the business and human rights field and discussed specific ways in which the Teaching Forum and Scholars Association could support the Facebook initiative. Bauer and Santoro followed up the call by sending King, at his request, a list of seven business and human rights scholars whom they recommended be considered for the Commission. There was little communication from King and Persily following that and we later learned through an Internet search that the Initiative, Social Science One, had been launched without a business and human rights scholar on the Commission or any of its subcommittees.

We believe that the absence of business and human rights expertise within the Initiative is a missed opportunity and diminishes the capacity of the Initiative. The message of our original letter to Schrage and Ginsberg about the value of a business and human rights analysis to address the ethical and public policy issues raised by Facebook’s data access policies remains as salient today as when we sent it last May, and therefore we have chosen today to share it publicly.

Contact:

Prof. Joanne Bauer, Co-Director, Business and Human Rights Teaching Forum, jjb71@columbia.eduProf. Michael Santoro, President, Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association, masantoro@scu.edu

¹An early example is Scott Jerbi in relation to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is, Scott Jerbi, "Facebook’s Problem with Political Ads - Can Human Rights Due Diligence Help?" Institute for Human Rights and Business, September 28, 2017.